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The new arrivals are viewed with suspicion and blamed for severe overcrowding problems, rising crime rates and the stretching of public services to breaking point. They seek the acceptance that the Kashmiri community earned over decades.

Instead, they feel rejected by the very people they believe should most appreciate their sense of isolation.

Humayun Ansari is the author of The Infidel Within: Muslims in Britain 1800, a recently published analysis of Muslim immigration to Britain. He believes that intercommunal ethnic violence is far more widespread in Britain than was thought.

“There is a general trend towards older, more established Asian communities in Britain taking on the fears of the host nation,” he said, suggesting that newly arrived single men were particular targets for demonisation.

“Asian communities pride themselves on extended family traditions. To them, the solitary asylum-seeker or migrant worker, more often than not a young man in his late twenties, provides an example of predatory behaviour.”

The Kashmiri enclave around Gladstone Road, Peterborough, is a street of Victorian semis littered with the detritus of an impoverished underclass. Mohammed Choudhry, 45, director of the Gladstone Community Association, a local support group, delivers a withering denunciation of his Kurdish neighbours. “There are some serious cultural differences,” he says. “The newcomers have a lack of commitment. Asians who arrived here 50 years ago were very hard working. They assimilated into the community and have made some notable achievements.

“The Kurds, for the most part, are single young men. They are aggressive and at times arrogant. They refuse to move from street corners; they are disrespectful to our women. This has led to tensions. The newcomers should be restricted to certain areas.”

The disturbances in May and a further outbreak of hostilities in July, when a hundred youths fought in the streets, were sparked by claims that a group of Iraqis had been harassing local Pakistani women.

The anti-Kurd sentiments of Peterborough’s Pakistani population are partly fuelled by a perception that the newcomers are moving solely into areas of the city that were historically Kashmiri.

Imam Abdul Rashid Nomani, of the Islamic Centre on Gladstone Road, said initially that the summer’s problems had all been resolved and that many Kurds worshipped at his mosque. Later, however, he complained that some houses in “Kashmiri” streets were now being occupied by up to ten Kurds. “They want to be near us so that they can get access to the halal food stores — but that sometimes leads to differences. They hold more liberal values.”

Peterborough’s Kurds have the sympathy of Yassin Ismail, 38, director of the Somali Refugee Action Group in Woolwich, which is home to thousands of Somalis who have fled their homeland since the country’s civil war.

Some have found themselves in open confrontation with members of the established West Indian community who, like the Kashmiris of Peter- borough, have found it tempting to blame all their ills on “parasitic” refugees.

“The Somalis are the newcomers,” Mr Ismail said. “They tend to face persecution and alienation. Even now, there exists a number of stereotypes about us: that we are people without principles and live like warring tribes.”

Many outbreaks of violence are caused by fundamental misunderstandings, he said. “When people from other cultures see a group of Somali men walking down the street, they get scared. They never stop to think: why are the men walking in a big group? It is because they are scared. As a newcomer to this country, doesn’t it make sense that we would find comfort in numbers?”

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